COVER STORY : The New Player in Town : Tim Robbins plays a studio exec who thinks he can get away with murder in ‘The Player.’ So why does Hollywood love him and the movie? Because it’s all about their deals and their souls.

EXTERIOR. RESTAURANT--NIGHT

A rented Dodge pulls into the crowded parking lot at Morton’s. It’s Monday night, the night the Hollywood watering hole is jammed with studio execs, agents and producers.

INTERIOR. DODGE--NIGHT

Behind the wheel, Tim Robbins peers out at a dazzling array of luxury cars.

TIM

BMW. BMW. Mercedes. Saab. Mercedes. Jag. Another BMW. (Dryly) Well, I’ll bet this is the only Dodge they’re going to see tonight.

A parking attendant approaches his car, staring curiously at the Dodge.

TIM

(grins)

You know, I have a feeling he’s going to be putting our car out back.

One show-biz hot spot you don’t see in “The Player,” Robert Altman’s new black comedy about Hollywood, is Morton’s, the Melrose Avenue restaurant that plays host every Monday night to the movie industry elite.

Talk about type-casting. If Altman had shot “The Player” here, he would have captured more deal-making than you could ever fit into one movie.

The ultimate in-crowd rendezvous, Morton’s is abuzz tonight with agents nervously schmoozing clients, writers excitedly pitching projects and studio execs digesting the weekend’s box-office results.

As Tim Robbins takes a seat at an A-list table (by the dining room entrance, the most visible spot in the room), he can gaze across the room and see a Hollywood icon at virtually every table.

Disney Studios Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg is just leaving as Robbins comes in. Hollywood billionaire Marvin Davis and pop star Kenny Rogers are at the next table, dining with their wives. Off to the right is MCA Motion Picture Group Chairman Tom Pollock. Down a few tables is the man everyone calls Laddie, MGM/Pathe studio chief Alan Ladd Jr. And who’s that table-hopping? Of course--it’s action-picture kingpin Joel Silver.

This is the realm satirized in “The Player,” a movie that knifes through the status-driven world of Griffin Mill, a studio executive who literally thinks he can get away with murder.

Morton’s, like Hollywood, has a subtle hierarchy. The moguls are situated at tables in front of the palm trees that form a dividing line between A-list and B-list seatings. The scrambling young agents hug the bar, where they can mix with a bevy of scantily dressed aspiring starlets. Blondes to brunettes by a 10-to-1 margin, they keep a close eye on the action, occasionally shimmying off to the powder room, seeing how many tables they can brush past on their way back.

Robbins has seen these faces before--as a struggling young actor, an outsider looking in. “I’ve seen these people long before I could ever afford to come here,” he says as a waiter brings him a menu. “I delivered pizzas to their houses in Beverly Hills. I worked as a waiter at the Hillcrest Country Club. I’ve been glad-handed by the best of them.”

Tonight, Robbins, 33 with wisps of gray in his hair, has returned as an insider. He’s on Griffin Mill’s turf, in the eye of the hurricane. “The Player” has spawned such torrid word-of-mouth that by now everyone in Hollywood’s seen it--or claims they have.

Robbins is certainly getting the hot-ticket treatment. Women at the bar stare. Waiters dote. A Creative Artists Agency aide materializes, introducing Robbins to actress Robin Wright, one of the agency’s new clients.

Wearing a black cowboy shirt and jeans, Robbins is hardly impressed by all this chilly glamour. He shies away from the Hollywood spotlight. Best known for the character of Nuke Laloosh, the loopy pitching phenom in “Bull Durham,” he’s made his name playing other quirky characters in such films as “Five Corners,” “Tapeheads” and “Jacob’s Ladder.”

But now the glad-handing is in high gear. Midway through dinner, Touchstone Pictures chief David Hoberman stops by to chat. Later, Bill Gerber, a production executive at Warner Films, visits for a few minutes. Robbins spent time with both men researching his studio executive role.

When he gets up to leave, Gerber jokes: “Well, I’m outta here. You won’t have Griffin Mill to kick around anymore.”

Robbins takes the kidding in stride. The only time he seems unnerved is when he spots the director of a flop movie he made years ago. Embarrassed, he ducks his head, hoping to avoid an awkward encounter.

The moment revives memories of the days when Robbins was a young nobody, desperate for a decent part.

“I was the episodic TV psycho,” he recalls, sipping decaf cappuccino and smoking a cigarette. “I’d always play the bad guy. I did the first four episodes of ‘St. Elsewhere,’ playing a psychotic terrorist. It was the typical TV terrorist part--you were crazy but without any specific political philosophy.”

Robbins takes a drag on his cigarette. “At first, I never got cast because I brought this attitude with me. I was just out of college, into punk rock and all that stuff. I was probably an asshole. I had a chip on my shoulder.”

He shrugs. “It finally worked for me, but only when I found someone who wanted to cast me as an asshole.”

GRIFFIN MILL

So the rumors are true?

HIS LAWYER

The rumors are always true. You know that.

The delicious irony is that by playing a silkier version in Griffin Mill, the cold-blooded studio exec, Robbins is now on everybody’s A-list. “It’s classic Hollywood logic,” says one producer. “Tim’s hot not only because he’s so good in the movie, but because he makes a creepy character--a creepy Hollywood character--seem likable.”

Adapted by Michael Tolkin from his novel of the same name, “The Player” has quickly become what passes for a cause celebre in Hollywood. Full of cameos by real screen stars (including Cher, Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts and Anjelica Huston), it paints such an acid movie-land portrait that Hollywood insiders bombarded Robert Altman with calls, vying to be the first ones to screen it.

(Altman was hardly impressed. Upon hearing that Columbia Pictures Chairman Mark Canton wasn’t watching the film in its entirety at a private screening, the director yanked the movie in mid-reel and proceeded to publicly criticize Canton at every opportunity.)

A mordant thriller, “The Player” doesn’t pull any punches. It portrays a studio top gun enmeshed in both a murder investigation and a nasty studio power struggle. Directed by Altman with knowing aplomb, it’s layered with love-hate Hollywood Angst fueled by Altman’s memories of decades of infighting with studio tyrants.

As Griffin Mill, Robbins is cool and impassive, keeping a tight rein on his emotions. Wearing double-breasted Alexander Julian suits, he romances women on his cellular phone, taps Binaca on his tongue before a kiss and samples endless varieties of bottled water.

Robbins plays Mill as the ultimate Hollywood hollow man--insecure and self-absorbed, bereft of passion or ideals, a master only of ceremony. Staring at his water over a power breakfast, Mill primly informs a waiter: “This is a red wine glass. Can I have my water in a water glass?”

It’s easy to see why Altman picked Robbins for the part. At 6-foot-4, he’s a big man with a baby face, soft and pudgy, anchored by a pug nose. His doughy features give him a look of boyish innocence and intensity. It’s the perfect countenance for his roles, which often find him overwhelmed by events beyond his control.

Relishing the prospect of working with Altman, Robbins put on his best suit, slicked back his hair and went out to the director’s Malibu home to campaign for the part.

“He was just the right guy,” Altman says. “He’s smart and very instinctual. And he’s a little enigmatic, which was perfect for the part. Tim has such a childlike honesty in our picture that you’re never put off by what could have been a despicable character.

“At one point, the foreign investors wanted me to bounce him and find a bigger name. And I just said, ‘No way. I’m sticking with him. If you lose him, you lose me too.’ ”

Robbins wanted the part as much as Altman wanted him. Coming off a grueling five-month shoot making “Jacob’s Ladder,” Robbins had laid low, recuperating and spending time with his family. (He lives in New York with actress Susan Sarandon, who is expecting the couple’s second child.)

A bright, thoughtful guy who’s prefers debating the merits of Bertolt Brecht or Jeffersonian democracy to scrutinizing Hollywood celebrity, Robbins was desperate to find a meaty role. Reading stacks of bad scripts, he grew despondent.

“I wasn’t crazy about anything, but I was running out of money,” he recalls. “Finally, as I was on the verge of making a movie I really didn’t want to do, I went to see ‘The Doors.’ And that really made me depressed.

“Here was this powerful story about someone staying true to their muse--and there I was, about to do this schlock movie. When Altman offered me this part, it was like an angel had appeared out of nowhere to save me from all that Pablum.”

To slip into the Griffin Mill character, Robbins spent a day with both Hoberman and Gerber, two savvy studio executives who served as models for the role.

“Tim watched a few pitch meetings, came to a staff meeting, listened to conference calls, even watched dailies,” Hoberman said. “He got the whole day.”

When he saw the film, Gerber was impressed. “Tim captured (our frantic schedule) well,” he said. “He had the rhythms of the pitch meetings, the rapid-fire phone list. It was very realistic.”

Of course, both executives feigned surprise when told people had fingered them as prototypes for the part. “I just took it as a compliment that Tim came to me for help in preparing,” Gerber said.

Hoberman was equally modest. “Put it this way,” he said with a laugh, “I thought Tim was a brilliant student of Billy Gerber.”

Robbins credits much of his performance’s stylish ease to Altman, who encouraged his cast to experiment and improvise. One of the film’s most unsettling scenes shows Mill being questioned by two homicide detectives, played by Whoopi Goldberg and singer Lyle Lovett.

When it came time to shoot the scene, Altman gathered his cast together. “He said, ‘I’ve seen this a million times on ‘Streets of San Francisco,’ ” Robbins recalls. “So we spent the day we were supposed to be shooting it talking about it and rewriting it.”

When Altman finally shot the scene, no one would ever confuse it with hackneyed TV.

Goldberg is seen interrupting her interrogation to search for a box of tampons, while Lovett darts around collecting dead flies. When Robbins gives a corny courtroom-drama speech declaring his innocence, the police station erupts in derisive laughter.

GRIFFIN MILL

To market a film successfully, you need suspense. Laughter. Violence. Hope. Heart. Nudity. Sex. And happy endings. Mainly happy endings.

Robbins sees “The Player” as an expose of more than just Hollywood deal-making. “I think the movie is ultimately about things more universal than Hollywood,” he explains. “It’s what happens when people in Hollywood or any industry make decisions based on greed.”

Robbins stared out across the room, studying the assemblage of industry burghers. “No one wants to make a movie that simply turns a profit anymore. Now it has to be an enormous success. It’s gotten completely insane.

“That kind of pressure does crazy things to the creativity of a business. Now everyone is test-marketing the endings of films, test-marketing the trailers. The priority isn’t the film’s quality--it’s the profit margin.”

Robbins frowns. “This business with test audiences is incredible. The studios aren’t happy with 70% approval ratings anymore. They want 95% approval!”

He lights another cigarette. “If they really want to get it right, why don’t they just invite Seth and Debbie from the Valley onto the set? Why wait until the movie’s done? Why not let the target audience sit in the director’s chair and make the decisions right then and there?”

Robbins voice is thick with sarcasm. “We could get all the answers right away. How did they like my line-reading in that scene? What did they think of the latest plot twist? How did the love scenes play for them? Why wait for a test screening?”

Robbins has tried to protect himself from this test-marketing lunacy by carving a niche for himself outside Hollywood. Between films, he serves as artistic director of the Actors Gang, an adventuresome theater group he helped found in 1981 while studying theater at UCLA.

Robbins will also make his debut as a film director in September with “Bob Roberts,” a political satire about a right-wing folk singer who runs for the U.S. Senate. The film, with a budget of less than $4 million, is being financed by Working Title Film, a British company. Robbins is in the process of securing a distributor.

But sitting here in the spotlight, eyeing this gallery of Hollywood insiders, Robbins wonders if he has the tenacity--the Griffin Mill persistence--to beat the system at its own game.

“Everyone is part of the system,” he says quietly. “I don’t delude myself that I’m not.

“You’re left with a tough choice. Do you work within the system and become an attack dog to protect your work? Or do you go outside the system and work for less money so you can have more control over your work?”

Robbins freely admits he’s matured since his days as a young hothead playing cardboard psychos on TV. He has a family to help feed, a drama company to help finance. He knows he won’t always have the luxury of waiting for the right part.

“Seven years ago, I would have made a lot of comments about actors doing schlock and how easy it is to avoid it. But now I know there’s, well, something else involved.”

Robbins is searching for the right word when an actor friend appears at his table, full of effusive praise for “The Player.”

“Have you seen the reviews?” the actor asks. “They were incredible. Absolutely aces!”

Robbins smiles. His noncommittal public smile. The inscrutable smile of Griffin Mill.

He’s still thinking about that “something else.” As he stands up to greet the actor, Robbins finds the right word, his Hollywood success mantra: “Luck.”

INT. THEATER

STAGE--NIGHT

We are in a tiny theater, watching an actor’s workshop. One actor lies motionless on the stage, like a corpse. Actors, all in white face, scurry around him--some gawking, others laughing and weeping. A tall, baby-faced workshop director, sprawled in a front-row seat, calls out instructions to a young actress kneeling by the corpse.

DIRECTOR

Look at him! Again! Use your eyes! Just one eye. . . . Now the other eye! The actress stares at the corpse and begins to moan and whimper.

DIRECTOR

More! Call on the gods! She begins to weep and wail.

DIRECTOR

More! The gods don’t hear you yet!

She starts shrieking like a banshee. Surely the gods must hear her now.

DIRECTOR

Now, silently for the gods.

A look of agony sweeps across her face. Her eyes are full of sorrow. She rocks from side to side, then tumbles over backward, shaking her fists on the stage.

DIRECTOR (nodding his head)

Good. Very good.

The tall, baby-faced director is, of course, Tim Robbins. He’s at a tiny theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, helping run a workshop with new recruits for his Actors Gang theater group.

Led by Robbins and Ned Bellamy, another Actors Gang director, the workshop is a raucous affair. Wearing mime-style white face, the actors roar around the stage--laughing, growling and howling at the moon. It’s all primal stuff. Cloudbursts of emotion. Raw gusts of anger. Goofy comic antics.

Inspired by Ariane Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soleil, which performed in Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, the Actors Gang has put on a variety of daring projects, most notably a much-lauded 1990 production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Good Woman of Setzuan.”

Wearing jeans and an ethnic-print shirt, Robbins cajoles the young actors, guiding them through exercises designed to school them in the Actors Gang’s ritualistic style and technique.

It’s no wonder Robbins has such an abiding passion for acting. As a boy, growing up in Greenwich Village, he watched his father, Gil Robbins, perform first in Broadway and Off Broadway shows, then as a folk singer and member of the 1960s folk group, the Highwaymen.

“I remember being very proud, seeing him on stage,” Robbins says a few days after his workshop session. “I’d go to folk concerts, where his group would be playing social protest songs, and I’d be amazed to see 1,000 people singing along with him.”

His father also managed the Gaslight, a popular Village nightspot. By the time Robbins was 10, he was hanging around the club, answering the phone, taking reservations and watching singers like Dave Von Ronk, Livingston Taylor and David Bromberg.

“I even snuck in to see Richard Pryor,” Robbins recalls. “But when my father saw me, I was forcibly removed.”

At 11, Robbins tagged along with his older sisters, who were stage managers for an avant-garde theater group. By the next summer, Robbins was performing himself. He spent eight summers in the troupe, singing and acting in political vaudeville sketches.

“Growing up in my family, you were always aware of social protest movements,” he says. “I remember when I was 11, my mother came into my bedroom and said, ‘You should be very proud of your sister. She was arrested today for protesting the Vietnam War.’

“My parents always made me aware of the world around me. They even made a conscious decision when I was little to move from L.A. to Greenwich Village.”

Why was moving to the Village such a big deal?

Robbins bursts into incredulous laughter. “Because that’s where it was happening!”

JUNE GUDMUNDSDOTTIR

I don’t go to movies.

GRIFFIN MILL

Why not?

JUNE

Life’s too short.

Robbins has the wry, self-effacing manner of an actor who was not an overnight success.

After he graduated from playing TV psychos, he took small parts in such films as “The Sure Thing.” Then he thought he’d hit the big time. He landed a big role in a much-ballyhooed George Lucas film. People were saying it would be the year’s big hit. It turned out to be the year’s biggest flop: “Howard the Duck.”

Robbins still shudders at the memory. “If ‘The Sure Thing’ led me to the idea that I could be in pictures,” he says, “then ‘Howard the Duck’ led me to despair.”

He bounced back, winning good reviews playing opposite Jodie Foster in a small film called “Five Corners.” His career finally blasted off when he took the mound, playing Kevin Costner’s wiggy teammate in “Bull Durham.”

“I’d never seen him in a movie before,” remembers director Ron Shelton. “But Tim came in wearing a goofy Mets cap and it was magic. I wanted someone Costner couldn’t compete with--who wasn’t just a younger version of Kevin. Someone from a completely different world.

“Tim auditioned a scene where you see Nuke Laloosh on the mound, talking to himself. Now that’s a tough audition scene to play in a casting office. Tim just stood there and talked out loud. And I honestly believed he was talking to himself. From then on, he owned the part.”

After “Bull Durham,” Robbins co-starred in films like “Tapeheads,” “Miss Firecracker” and “Cadillac Man” before assuming leading-man chores in “Jacob’s Ladder.” But he always took time out between films to work with the Actors Gang.

“It kept my priorities away from the grind of Hollywood,” he says. “But I know it drove my agents crazy, because it would destroy my momentum. I guess I didn’t have such a huge appetite for success.”

Watching Robbins at an Actors Gang workshop, you can see the roots of his lofty, childlike grace as a performer. When his actors lose their intensity on stage, Robbins shakes his fists, reminding them to focus on four basic emotions--happiness, sadness, anger and fear.

“Urgency! Urgency!” Robbins commands an actor who seems to have lost his bearings. “Keep it up!”

Seeing another actor relying on mannerisms, Robbins counsels: “Don’t get too complicated. Just play the space. Pick one person in the audience and look at them. Just stay still.”

Robbins’ screen performances have this same hushed intensity. Rhapsodizing about his “puckish commanding presence” in “Miss Firecracker,” the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote of Robbins: “He makes you feel that behind his sneaky, demon eyes he’s thinking thoughts no character in a movie has ever thought before.”

Kael isn’t the only one to marvel over Robbins’ enigmatic presence. Asked why he cast Robbins in “The Player,” Altman explained: “He has a lot of that ‘he’s moving around behind there and not letting you see it.’ You can’t keep your eyes off him.”

Playing Mill, Robbins is suave but inscrutable, the Hollywood exec as poker player.

“For me, the emotional life of the character was propelled by the fact that he has a secret and the audience is in on it,” he explains at Morton’s, watching the crowd start to thin out. “But he has to figure out how to keep that secret under wraps.”

Robbins holds a finger up to his eye. “Everything is in the eyes. It’s all unspoken, it’s all in his soul. If he even has a soul. Altman doesn’t think so.”

Does Robbins agree?

“I think Griffin has a soul at the beginning of the movie,” he says. “But it dies. By the end, he’s spiritually dead.”

GRIFFIN MILL

(Summarizing a screenwriter’s pitch)

So it’s kind of a psychic political comedy, but with a heart--right?

What begins as an interview with Robbins ends up as a marathon post-midnight political debate. Well-read and ferociously opinionated, he relishes talking about politics, theater, music--just about any subject, except talking about himself.

He jealously protects his privacy, keeping his family affairs to himself, except to say how much joy he takes from fatherhood and the bonds of domestic life. The best way to understand Robbins’ passions is by studying his work.

Much of the Actors Gang’s technique, for example, draws inspiration from the street theater Robbins performed as a child. He’s used a similarly raw, socially conscious style for “Bob Roberts,” his upcoming mock-documentary about a right-wing folk singer who becomes a popular hero.

(One of its influences is clearly Altman’s own “Tanner ‘88,” the HBO series satirizing the presidential campaign process.)

If “The Player” explores the politics of Hollywood, you might say “Bob Roberts” lampoons the Hollywoodization of politics.

“ ‘Bob Roberts’ is about how the public--and certainly the media--can be manipulated by emotional issues,” he says.

As Robbins sees it, the media’s political coverage, especially via TV news reportage, has been distorted by the same commercial pressures that have transformed Hollywood into a market-research medium.

“A nightly news show’s success is determined by how many people are viewing,” he says. “That’s forced TV to make civic issues compete in the same arena as entertainment. And that’s changed the focus of the news coverage. Instead of talking about campaign issues, TV news talks about scandal, because that’s clearly what gets ratings.”

Still, Robbins realizes audiences have little patience with humorless political tracts.

“In the Actor’s Gang, we try to entertain--the ideas will come out,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than going to a play where the author has already decided he’s going to teach you something. It’s condescending.”

Robbins thinks Brecht had the right idea about the politics of theater.

“What Brecht understood is that human behavior, even in its most desperate manifestations of hunger and violence, can have humor,” he explains. “Brecht isn’t saying that hunger is funny. But the behavior produced by hunger can be very funny.”

Could you say the same about “The Player”? That it slyly contends that it’s not so much Hollywood that is ripe for satire, but the behavior produced by Hollywood?

As Robbins ponders the question, he surveys his surroundings. Most of the tables at Morton’s are empty. The Griffin Mill crowd has gone home for the night. Why would they care about Brecht. What did he know--he never had a $100-million hit, did he?

“That’s the whole point, whether you’re talking about ‘The Player’ or any satire,” Robbins finally says.

“First you laugh at the humor. And then later, when it settles in, you think about it and see that things can be funny. And scary too.”